Wedding Bell Blues: The Power of the Pen

Is reading believing? Photo by: brody4

One advantage celebrities have over everyone else is name recognition.  In divorce situations, this means they can tell and sell their story from their point of view, reaping revenge with a capital “R.”

Eddie Fisher didn’t have too many kind words for his ex in his autobiography Been There, Done That, depicting Debbie Reynolds as a self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony and “the antithesis of sex.”

She complained so much that Eddie “would leave the house praying for a miracle – that by the time I got home she would have disappeared.”

Fisher didn’t spare her mother either, describing her as “the human equivalent of chalk scratching on a blackboard.”

Reynolds, in turn, in Debbie: My Life, portrayed Fisher as an uncaring, moody, son-of-a-gun who, if he wasn’t playing cards with the guys, wanted to be left alone, except when it came to Elizabeth Taylor.  As far as their troubled marriage, “Things would get better,” she wrote.  “He’d go out on the road for a week or ten days and come back in a friendlier frame of mind.  And when we went out with others, he could be very nice.”

Over thirty years later another Hollywood golden couple were the talk of the town with their good looks, their successful careers, and their perfect marriage, but when Burt Reynolds sued Loni Anderson for divorce, it was obvious it wasn’t so perfect after all.   Anderson took the high ground, keeping her mouth shut until she had written her account of events.  Reynolds couldn’t wait, heading straight to the National Enquirer to recount his tale of woe before he, too, settled down to pen his memoirs.

In 2008, a year after Whitney Houston divorced Bobby Brown, his autobiography, Bobby Brown: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But, hit the bookstores.

“I never used cocaine until I met Whitney Houston,” Brown declared, putting her habit squarely on her doorstep.  He believed his marriage was doomed from the beginning, not because he slept around, but for the reason that he and Whitney had different agendas: she wanted to be transformed, to have an urban, gritty edge; he wanted to be loved and have children.  He further blamed the media for making him out to be “like Ike Turner, when that wasn’t my character.”

Houston reserved comment.

Although Houston never put pen to paper, she got her turn in a two-part interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show the following year. Concerning the end of her marriage, she stated, “I wasn’t going to be in an unholy matrimony.  I wasn’t going to be living with a man who decided that he didn’t want to live the same way I did or thought about marriage or me the same way.  Being loyal.  Being dedicated. Being true.  Being faithful.  All those things.”

Now whom do you believe?

© 2012 Susan Marg – All Rights Reserved